Locker 96
by Mizufae
Summary: Freddie's locker has been witness to some interesting things. Fatcakes and fish, for two of them. Revolves around the events in iKiss, but doesn't talk about them. Seddie, of course!
1. Chapter 1

**A/N Hi all! This will be a 2 chapter story. It was inspired by the nick extra scoop "Locker Tours!" and deals with events leading up to, and after, the episode iKiss. Don't worry, it's a pretty different perspective on the whole thing, I hope. Please leave me a review if you enjoy! (Or if you don't!)**

Locker 96 is small and near to the ground. Freddie fills it with textbooks and notes, and the occasional piece of technological equipment that he doesn't value very much. There's the usual school ephemera - broken #2 pencils, gym clothes that don't quite fit anymore, a tightly shut umbrella with one spoke broken, five emergency bucks hidden inside a college text about molecular theory. On the inside of the locker door are carefully cutout pictures of cars and road signs. Freddie has dreams, sometimes, about driving down Route 66 as far as it goes, all by himself. He knows, of course, that it will likely never happen. A driver's license is two years off, and he should start begging his mother for a learner's permit now to get one by next year. Not to mention that whole not having a car thing. He'll cross that bridge when he comes to it.

Locker 96 is fairly clean, and the lock works a treat, but there's a distinct problem with the security. Sam knows the combination. When she made Freddie switch lockers with her last year, it was pretty early in September, and Freddie had let the combination to his old locker fly out of his mind in the wake of eighth grade algebra. Sam, though, must secretly have a head for data, because she still remembers hers. Freddie has asked to get the combination changed, but the only way to replace the lock is if it breaks, and he's not about to deface school property.

Almost in retaliation of this refusal to break things, Sam seemed to have taken it upon herself to make Freddie's interactions with his locker as miserable as possible. Since the locker switch, Freddie has opened his locker door to find all manner of perplexing, disgusting things waiting for him.

It didn't start out so bad. Sometimes, Freddie would find Sam's second lunch stowed in his locker, kept there so she wouldn't be tempted to eat it between classes like she often does with her first lunch. There was the time he found an actual notebook, with notes on history in Sam's broad, badly capitalized handwriting. When Sam would get ideas for making iCarly better, she would slip notes into Freddie's locker with her thoughts scrawled on them, unsigned, as though she was embarrassed for having had them. Once, after Shannon started slipping love notes through the grill of his locker, Freddie found a few of them defaced with Sam's surprisingly accurate doodles. There was one of Shannon with her head chopped off with an axe, blood spurting in red sharpie pen all down the curly, loopy text of her letter. Freddie had kept that one, tucked next to his emergency cash, and would glance at it if he needed a chuckle.

But sometime between eighth grade and now, Sam had ramped up her invasion of Freddie's privacy. The doodles among his math homework that Sam "borrowed" to copy gave way to the homework just never coming back. She kept her smelly gym clothes in his locker. When he'd confronted her about that, she'd simply looked at him and replied, "Well, you don't expect me to let them stink up _my_ locker, do you?" and crossed her arms, as though this was perfectly reasonable.

*

About two weeks after the last gym clothes incident, Freddie opened his locker to find a package of Lofat Fat Cakes placed smack dab on the center of his science notebook. He cocked a suspicious eyebrow; what had Sam done to his locker now? He flipped through all his books, looking for errant smelly socks. He double checked that the hinges weren't sawn through. There were no suspiciously absent notebooks, nor were there any additional ones. He reached over and grabbed a Fat Cake. He hadn't exactly developed a taste for them, so much as gotten used to eating them now and again. Sam was in his locker so much, she'd taken to keeping snacks there. It basically worked like an early warning system. Freddie chewed contentedly, wiped his mouth clean of pink sugar dust, and pulled out his wallet to check if he had money for lunch.

Damn, he hadn't packed a lunch last night, and in his hurry to get out the door before his mom tried to make him change his outfit, he'd forgotten to get lunch money. He wiped his sugary hands off on his brand new shirt. He was proud of it; it actually fit him, unlike half of his too-small wardrobe, and he'd bought it himself, without his mother's supervision. She didn't like it one bit. Freddie rummaged around in his locker until he found the old textbook he kept his emergency lunch money in.

He figured, Sam would never crack open a book about molecular theory, nor would she bother to wonder why he had it. To her, a dork was a dork, and whatever dorks were into was definitely worth ignoring. Except, of course, that she was quite proficient with all the tech equipment Freddie used for iCarly. He'd started to suspect she knew more than she was letting on when he caught her uploading new audience applause sound files to her "noise box". When he'd taught her how to use Camera A in case he needed to be on screen and use both hands, he'd only had to explain things once. Carly had required a diagram. It was a little uncanny, but maybe Sam just thought it was useful, instead of dorky. Sub-atomic particles were nowhere near sound boards on the nerd scale.

So when he opened up his book safe to find the carefully carved hollow empty of his five dollars, Freddie groaned and thumped his head against the locker door. That would be why Sam had left her calling card. She just stole his emergency funds! And now, he had no way to get lunch. Freddie shot Sam glares that would give a normal man a heart attack in the cafeteria, but he still went hungry. He reached over to eat some of Sam's fries and received a stern slap on the wrist. "Don't come between momma and her pommes frites." Sam had French class right before lunch.

*

Now locker 96 is a time bomb. On Friday afternoon Sam had visited, to first retrieve her Fat Cakes and second, to leave Freddie a gift. She unwrapped her present and carefully taped it to the ceiling of his locker with three lengths of clear packing tape. When Freddie came by to get his books for the weekend, he noticed that the Fat Cakes were gone, but not what they had been replaced with.

By this Monday afternoon, after an AV Club meeting, Freddie's backpack has been stuffed inside locker 96 for the whole day. A rank smell greets him when he kneels down in the quiet hallway to retrieve his bag. Thinking it must be residue from his locker neighbors having just been there after wrestling practice, he doesn't do much but wrinkle his nose, until he touches his backpack and feels a greasy, oily slick down the front.

"Oh, god!" Freddie flicks his hand to remove some of the goo, but then something soft, slimy, and slightly warm flops down from the top of his locker and rolls out, onto his bent knees. "Aaack!" he screams, a bit too high pitched for decorum, and leaps away. On the floor by his feet is a rotting trout, with a few pieces of greasy tape still attached. Its glassy eye stares up at him, unblinking, and the stench is, if anything, intensified. "SAM!" Freddie is livid.

Carly is home, likely contentedly eating cookies and laughing. Sam is in detention, likely arranging betting pools for how long a new substitute is going to last. The fish is still lying dead, marooned on the hallway floor in a pile of its own ichor. Freddie is stalking angrily over to Sam's locker, and when he gets there he fishes, pun intended, in his pocket to retrieve the multitool he'd just stowed after AV.

Freddie is no idiot. He understands the simple mechanism of the school's locks, and makes short work of the one on locker 52 with a little leverage, a little fiddling with a thin screwdriver, and a little punching his fist into the seam of the door. Sam's locker yawns open before him, and Freddie casts his eyes over his options. Bolt cutter? No, too violent. Setting fire to homework? As if Sam kept homework in her locker. Taping a fish to the ceiling of _her_ locker? Where the hell did Sam get her hands on a trout, anyway? No, he needs something fast, something annoying, and something feasible.

"Hola, Freddie, que pasa?" Gibby is walking down the hall in his slightly loping way, obviously fresh out of Spanish club. He adjusts the sombrero on his head. "Dude, do you have any idea where that smell is coming from?"

"Yes, Gibby. I do." Freddie sees the glint of the handcuffs and is struck with inspiration. "Come on, I need you to lend me a hand." He grabs the handcuffs Sam had stolen from that cop in Japan, pockets the key, and pushes Gibby with a kind hand on the shoulder all the way to Sam's detention.

"Oh, is it for iCarly? Cuz my mom said to tell you that I can't have any more ham thrown at me. It's too high-sodium or something." Gibby's voice trails away as they walk down the hall.

What happens next is that in about five minutes, Freddie comes dashing down the hall. He grabs his backpack that was lying in front of locker 96 in mid-run, and sprints to his bike as quickly as possible. One minute after that, Sam is blazing past, half dragging, half carrying a stupefied Gibby after her. She is so oblivious to her surroundings that she doesn't notice the oozing trout on the floor. Her foot comes straight down on it, and flies out from beneath her. Sam and Gibby end up in a groaning heap, flecked with fish juices.

Sam's growl is so loud that it disrupts choir practice down the hall. With a heave, she grabs the open edge of Freddie's locker door and lugs herself to a standing position; Gibby follows, pulled harshly by the wrist. Sam looks at the crushed, putrefied fish, and slams locker 96's door shut with a resounding clang. Resuming the chase, she nearly wrenches Gibby's arm out of his socket.

*

For the week after this, Sam doesn't visit Freddie's locker. He spends it deodorizing and worrying, having borrowed some powerful substance from his mother's closet full of chemical cleaning agents. And then, for the week following that, nobody visits Freddie's locker. That's due to Freddie not being in school, embarrassed beyond measure and moping alternately in his room and on the balcony out in the hallway of Bushwell Plaza.

When Freddie finally comes back to school, not much has changed. His locker still smells fresh as a chemically recreated daisy, and Sam hasn't been using it as secondary storage.

In fact, Sam stops breaking into locker 96 entirely. She stops keeping another lunch in it. She stops irretrievably borrowing homework. She stops leaving Freddie notes for iCarly improvement. There aren't even any humorous doodles of Freddie as a soulless robot on his history notes.

Freddie has a pretty good idea why she's staying away. When he walks over to talk to Sam and Carly, Sam will suddenly have her head deep in her locker, rummaging for some non-existent binder. At lunch, Sam refuses to look him in the eye, even when he's sitting directly across from her. The pranks have stopped, but the insults haven't, and she always makes stubbornly sure that Freddie leaves whatever room they're both in first, to show that she _doesn't mind_ his dweebish presence and that everything is _totally back to normal_.

Normality is subjective. One day, Freddie removes all his meticulously taped car pictures from the inside of his locker door and places them in a folder. Then, he lines the door with tantalizing packages of beef jerky. He makes sure that one pouch is slightly open, the smoky aroma forming a pleasantly meaty cloud of scent coming from the grille on the locker face.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N I could not have written this without massive amounts of help from AColdSky. Thanks! This is the conclusion. I hope everyone likes it; if you have any thoughts on it, please leave me a review! **

Locker 96 smells, pretty pungently, of beef jerky for the next week or so. Freddie has gotten so used to it that he doesn't realize he's perfumed himself with it. Every time he opens a textbook in class, a little waft of jerky flavoring puffs out. There are a few increasingly curious moments at Carly's, where Carly will have left to go to the bathroom, or change her clothes, and Freddie will turn around to find Sam within a foot of him, with her nose slightly lifted in the air. He chooses the high road, and ignores her, but makes sure to scrub everywhere twice during showers, even in places his mother doesn't contractually require.

Generally, everything is hunky-dory between Sam and Freddie, as far as Carly and the world is concerned. What awkwardness there is seems mitigated by the fact that Sam is never found within two feet of Freddie when anybody else is in the room. But there's a sort of distance that fills the air, and neither one of them seems to have the energy to escalate an exchange of insults to a crackling, thundering fight. It's quieter in the Shay apartment, and in the Ridgeway hallway, than it has been in two years.

It takes Sam a little while to track down the source of Freddie's new cologne, but she eventually comes with Carly to ask Freddie a technical question by his locker, instead of hanging back like she's taken to doing for the past month or so.

Freddie is kneeling down by his locker, winding some cords between his elbow and wrist with the practiced rhythm of an inveterate nerd. He's blocking the door of locker 96 with his body, and when he sees Sam walking with a purposefully bored expression on her face behind Carly, he leans back, letting the crinkle of the jerky pouches rub against the back of his shirt.

"What's up?" Freddie asks, stowing his neatly wrapped cords in his backpack. Sam has the oddest posture, she's leaning down without realizing it, sniffing the air.

"I was wondering if you knew how to make iCarly sepia tone? Because I have this idea for a skit that would be set in the wild west, and we already have the tumbleweeds…" Carly's question drags on as Freddie carefully packs his things while blocking what's in his locker door. He responds with a quick explanation of live streaming color filters, and shuts locker 96 fast with his foot as he stands up. He smiles quickly at Carly and Sam, and walks past the two of them towards the school exit.

Sam hangs back a bit, not noticing Freddie's smirk due to her distraction. "Oh, hey, Carls, I forgot my, um, thing, I'll be back in a second!" Sam waves Carly and Freddie out the door and walks purposefully back to locker 96, led by her nose.

She dials in the combination in a practiced triple flick of her wrist, and pops open the locker door. "Eeep!" she screams, a bit too high pitched for decorum. Looking around to make sure nobody heard that, Sam palms the first package of beef jerky that she sets eyes on – her favorite brand, she notes – and leaves the rest. When Sam catches up with Carly and Freddie, she's grinning wildly, and has to fight to wipe it off her face.

*

The next day, Freddie stops by his locker after lunch to pick up his oversized science textbook. Sam had left lunch early, apparently to "stuff some guy's shoes in a vat of mayo" that she had spied while in the cafeteria line. Carly had shrugged, and gone back to picking the crunchiest bits out of her salad. Freddie had gotten instantly suspicious. Why would Sam ever skip out on the second half of lunch?

The noise locker 96 makes when Freddie pops the latch is always the same, except this time. Instead of a slightly hollow sound, it makes a flat click. Something is up. Wisely blocking his face, Freddie pulls back the door as fast as possible, like ripping off a Band-Aid.

Meatballs, the inexpensive kind, flood out of locker 96 in a torrent. Some bounce down the hallway, rubbery and firm. Other spill onto Freddie's lap. They're wedged in everywhere, stuffed into the pockets of Freddie's jacket, split on the broken spoke of his umbrella, there's even a few tucked into the hollow of his book safe, along with, Freddie notes later, an extra five dollar bill.

Freddie is rolling on the ground, wracked with laughter, surrounded by brown meatballs. There's one stuck to his face and he absolutely does not care about it. The kids in the hallway give him a wide berth, and a janitor drags a trashcan over with a grumble. "Suppose you'll be wanting me to clean your mess up for you, huh?" He pokes Freddie a bit with the butt end of his broom.

The bell rings, and Freddie wipes the tears out of his eyes. "Oh, yeah, would you? I have to get to class!" He slips on a couple of meatballs as he flits to science, waving a "thanks!" to the janitor on his way. The janitor reaches onto his cart to grab a dustpan and shuts the open door of locker 96 closed with the broom. All of the beef jerky is gone.

*

Freddie stays behind after school to clean out his locker. He finds the extra five dollars and pockets them happily. According to Carly, Sam had been dragged off to detention immediately after the end of last period, due to a cafeteria worker finding his shoes covered in mayo. Freddie chuckles as he brushes meaty crumbs from between the pages of his notebooks. He meticulously tapes back up his car pictures that he'd preserved the whole time, flat in a folder.

The beef jerky lure had worked. Sam resumes her normal locker invasions. Now, when Freddie feels his stomach grumble, he's pretty sure there will be a Fat Cake or a bag of chips hanging out in his locker that he can snack on. The notes for iCarly suggestions come back with a vengeance at first. Freddie finds them strategically tucked into each binder he uses for classes, in order. Often, one idea in his science notebook will be followed up by a concept he'll find falling out of his French binder next period. He realizes with a little concern that this means Sam is aware of his class schedule every day, and has been planning accordingly. However, as the backlog of Sam's technically oriented ideas runs out, the notes do too.

She takes up the slack by putting her smelly gym clothes back in locker 96. The first time Freddie finds them again, he marches over to Sam and Carly and sticks them under Carly's nose.

"Ew!" Carly flinches away.

"See? Do you see? Sam put these in my locker! They aren't mine!" Freddie waggles them at Sam. She lifts an eyebrow.

"Are you sure they aren't yours?" Sam asks lazily.

Freddie unrolls the shirt, letting the other pieces fall to the floor. He holds it up to his torso. It stops about halfway down his stomach. "I don't think this just shrunk in the wash, do you?"

Sam makes gagging noises, while Carly titters behind them. "Do me a favor and never do that with my shorts, okay?" Sam grudgingly picks up the rest of her gym clothes – two brightly mismatched socks, a sports bra, the shorts with "Ridgeway" in block capitals printed down the side - from the floor and snatches the shirt out of Freddie's hands.

*

Freddie thinks he's gotten the issue solved. The rest of the week resumes as usual. There's the occasional Sam-decorated piece of math homework, the missing bananas from lunch, the baking soda and vinegar science project volcano explosion all over his library books. Freddie takes it in stride, chuckling at a picture that Sam obviously took of herself with his camera, of her chewing a candy bar he'd left for her among his extra pencils.

But the next week, her gym clothes are back. What was her issue? He wasn't exactly enamored of her scent. Directly confronting her didn't work. Complaining to Carly didn't work. And she isn't about to tell him what her motivation is. He has no choice. He brings them home and has his mother wash them.

Freddie comes back the next morning early, and puts the meticulously folded and pressed clothes in his locker. The shirt is a lighter shade of grey than it has been in a year. The shorts actually have creases in the sides. His mother had figured out how to fold a sports bra, after getting over the fact of washing one at all. And on top are two perfectly folded, brightly colored socks. One is green and pink argyle, the other blue with yellow polka dots. They clash horribly, much worse than before they'd been washed. They were so dirty, Marissa had run them through twice. It all smells lightly of lilac, and absolutely not of Sam's sweat, which as far as Freddie can tell, smells a little bit like ham and maple syrup. Freddie slams his locker door shut and heads out for his first class.

"What the hell have you done?" It's after second period and Freddie is rummaging for a protractor for math class. The gym clothes were gone when he had shown up, and now Sam is rushing towards him with a sock in each hand.

"What do you think I did? I washed your damn clothes!" Freddie stands up to meet her, but backs against the lockers as she walks straight at him, stopping only inches from his face.

"You. Washed. The. Socks." She waves them wildly in her hands.

"Well, my mom did, anyway. Twice!" Freddie puts two fingers up between their faces, trying very hard not to notice the subtle pink lipstick on Sam's angry face.

"My lucky socks! They haven't been washed for two years, ever since I crushed Selena Dawson's dodge ball record! I can't go to gym if I'm not wearing them, and now you washed them and that's the only class I get an A in!"

"You shouldn't leave your things in other people's spaces!"

"You shouldn't invite people in if they aren't wanted!"

"You shouldn't be so disgusting!"

"You shouldn't be such an idiot!" Sam throws the socks down onto the ground and grabs two fistfuls of Freddie's shirt, shoving him hard against the lockers. But Freddie's finally figured this move out, and is in the perfect position to grab her wrists and squeeze. She loosens her grip and he sweeps her ankle out from under her, and in her shock at Freddie fighting back, he's got her down on the ground, her hip a little numb from the impact with the linoleum tile.

Freddie's got her by a wrist and an ankle, kneeling down into her side lightly. "I don't care about your disgusting socks!" he shouts, close to her ear, her face pushed into the articles in question.

Sam growls. Freddie briefly takes stock of his position and realizes that he is in for it like never before, and consciously relaxes his body.

She kicks off his hold on her ankle, stands up in a split second, shoves Freddie upward, and flips him resolutely over her shoulder. He's flat on his back on the ground, groaning. Sam steps on his stomach. "I might just break your arm, now that I think of it."

Freddie's eyes open from their pained squint, and he looks up at Sam's imposing posture. "You were thinking of it, too?" he asks, simply.

Sam blushes and takes her foot off of Freddie, watches him get up and crack his neck. By the time he's done shaking off the pain in his joints, Sam and her socks are gone. Freddie closes his locker door and shoulders his backpack, a gnawing sensation in his stomach.

*

Sam's gym clothes are not found in locker 96 anymore. There's usually a Fat Cake to be found, though. Instead of Sam stealing his homework, Freddie starts to do it with her, making her wait after school with threats of telling his mom that she has fleas.

Freddie makes a binder labeled "iCarly" and writes "SAM" in a brown, chocolate scented marker on one of the sections. She starts to fill it up between classes, with skit ideas and theme suggestions, but there's the occasional comment on the lighting, and even the camera setup. Freddie has no idea where she learned about P2PTV protocols, but he responds to her suggestion with a diatribe on user supported networks that she scribbles all over with red and silver sharpies.

Sometimes, when Sam leaves a second lunch in his locker, Freddie will slip something nutritious into it, like an apple or an orange. One day, he puts half a package of beef jerky into her lunchbox, and chews on the other half on his way to class. He had it lying around, that's all.

The next morning Freddie sleeps in late by accident, and has to bike hurriedly to school. He misses breakfast, and his stomach is growling by the time he gets to his locker. Hoping Sam might have left a junky snack, he opens the door and takes a minute to absorb what he sees.

Locker 96 has a neat stack of notebooks and binders, a pile of pencils and pens, a discarded digital camera, and an old umbrella inside of it, just like normal. But on top of Freddie's first period notebook is a neatly folded napkin. Nestled inside is a package of three Lofat Fat Cakes with one missing, and a toasted bagel with grape jelly with a large, cartoonish bite taken out of it.

Freddie lunges greedily for the bagel. He's wolfing it down before the bell rings so fast that he only notices at the last second, that, placed between the Fat Cakes and the bagel, was a brand new tube of chapstick, with the words "_I hate you_" written in silver sharpie down the side. He swallows harshly and picks it up. He breaks the seal, and sniffs it, just to make sure Sam hasn't poisoned it or anything. Pocketing his gift, Freddie closes his locker door with a gentle push. He lilts down the hall, oblivious to the bell ringing. This is certainly an improvement on the fish.


End file.
